Jupiter’s monster storm, the Great Red Spot, was once so large that three Earths would fit inside it. But new measurements by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the largest storm in our solar system has downsized significantly. The red spot, which has been raging for at least a hundred years, is only the width of one Earth. What is happening? One possibility is that some unknown activity in the planet’s atmosphere may be draining energy and weakening the storm, causing it to shrink. The Hubble images were taken in 1995, 2009, and 2014.

My educated guess is that the storm is shrinking for reasons similar to how Earth storms end, by running out of energy. The life of a storm is obviously quite different on a gas giant like Jupiter, but it would not be realistic to expect an atmospheric feature like the Red Spot to remain unchanged forever.